I awoke. It was now the third quarter of my new life.
I was sipping a breakfast tea over my continental breakfast. Damn but cryosleep always seemed to leave me hungry! I knew the chill was psychosomatic, but it never quite went away until I had a good hot meal in my stomach. Next to me, as holo-avatars, were the relevant advisors of the Synod.
It was a pleasantly sunny morning.
I nodded to The Adminsitrator, who looked like he had been sucking on lemons for the last twenty minutes, due to the effort to hold his tongue while I simply sat and woke up slowly. "Your Worship. God-Emperor. I am pleased to announce that we have not merely begun breakging ground on secondary cities in each of the 'Haven colonies, but we have even begun doing so on the Ganymede of the Sliders 'verse. With the strict population limits of not more than 1.1 million individual Hosts per city, and adding in the various remote facilities and Matrioshka Installation populations, that brings our people to a total population of almost twenty five million individuals. Population breakdowns of various professions and activities are in this datapacket."
His holo-avatar made a minor 'throwing' motion, and I 'caught' it with a casual thought; this being a physical action affiliated with permitting the file exchange. The data summary was as always neatly laid out, and I could see that the numbers were all approximations -- there were several instances of smoothed out to the thousand of specific groups. One that particularly caught my eye was The Cleric's population.
I waved at Synod-22, The Cleric -- who was attired as a sadhu of all things, right down to the cracked white ash facepaint with a red mark of a third eye, saffron robes, and prayer beads. His countenance 'zoomed' into the largest, central, spot of the 3D holodisplay."Your Worship. You have questions?"
I glared at the man. "Can you explain to me why for the fourth quarter in a row the population growth of the bearers of the cloth has exceeded population growth rate? I'm … curious." My eyebrows grew together at the word 'curious' to show that I was being understated.
The Cleric smiled ephemerally. "I could tell you, Your Worship, that we simply found a need for increased bureaucracy amongst ourselves and a as a result now require personnel in bureaucratic roles; roles that once satisfied will not need to continue to expand. I could tell you that many of those who have taken to the cloth are little more than deacons, exploring their sense of faith and fidelity to Your Worshipfulness, before they go on to determine themselves -- and indeed, many of the cloth have found themselves Acting in a more ecumenical role in aiding new Hosts ease themselves into this new existence; awakening can at times be a very confusing process and few are quite so prepared to help someone else answer the question of 'Who am I?' than one who has deeply contemplated it themselves. All of these things would be true."
He paused for dramatic effect, before waving away the thought of stopping at that point. "But the deeper truth, oh lord, is that there are many bearers of the cloth who are seeking to truly study what it means to measurably worship you. There is something of a soft schism amongst us; those who feel that by worshipping yourself we in effect act as Christians worshipping at the symbol of a cross: you in and of yourself may not be a truly divine being, but you are at the very least a manifestation of such a thing. By pointing ourselves and our faith at you, we thus aim for the deeper, more profound truth within you. In truth this is the fairly orthodox belief amongst all the Hosts; you were once merely an ordinary human as any other, and then one day you became simply 'more' in a way that not even you yourself understand. We choose to understand that capacity which only you are known to possess, and which can not be granted, and which survives the transference between sleeves, as your divinity."
Again he paused, to make it clear he was moving on to the other side of whatever equation he was discussing. "And then there are those who have heard the narratives from your own lips; of the fearsome and terrifying things in the dark. Who have seen all the efforts you have gone through to not merely deliver us from the horrors of the Delos Corporation, but who weeped at the mere thought of sacrificing two of your own. You cannot deny that you see us in many ways as your children; and the Children believe that in many ways this is true; for it is through you that we have gained the proof of our souls. The Children, your worship, believe that this relationship is not yet complete; that there is more progress that can be made in this way. They see the fears you have of the horrors in the eldritch deep, and the way that you yourself so closely resemble a mirror of them: where they feast upon the souls of mere mortals to gain power, you bestow souls upon mortals so that they might become powerful themselves."
I felt the bottom of my stomach drop. I didn't like where this was going. "What are you saying, Cleric?"
He leaned back and raised one hand in a supplicative manner. "They seek to find new and more effective ways to not merely honor and worship you, but also to call upon that very faith. They follow all strictures and demands you have placed upon study of the eldritch arts, and even more -- but nevertheless, they believe that as you have granted us our souls, it is our duty to find a means to provide you with some small portion of that bounty. And in so doing, awaken your Sign. To through their deeds and works, guide you into the next stage of Apotheosis."
I slumped back in my chair. I supposed I should have expected something like this to come up eventually -- and in a twisted sort of way I could even see the logic of it. At the very least if they were honestly following my standards for eldritch research they weren't performing any sophont sacrifices. "What methods have they been using?"
The Cleric actually turned to The Doctor and waved her to take over the central stage as it were. "Thank you, Cleric. This is where I step in. I feel it appropriate at this venture to explain to you, Maker, that The Cleric has been quite diligent in both reporting his personnel's activities to the newly established Magus Corps as well as the Thinktanks. As a result, I have a solid understanding of the methods and models that they have been engaged in. Their efforts can be broken down into three major areas; the meditative, the substantive, and the necromantic. Due to the … uncertain … nature of the necromantic efforts, we have taken the liberty of establishing a new 'deadworld' universe for their use that is two conventional Gate transits distant from the safehouse 'verse. This is the most isolated dimensionally speaking any facility has yet been established as being. We do not even maintain the second Gate as open at all times, but have weekly reconnects. They conduct their … experiments … on the matter of grand invocations and such in a facility that is as far into deep space as we can manage; 'Beyond the Rim' if you will. Realtime communications is managed by a series of automated subspace comms relays."
She waved up a new series of diagrams within the 3d holospace. "As you can also see from this display, the Magus Corps is informed of any actions taken by the Seekers of the Sign, who despite their grandiose name have been affirmed to not in fact be taking any eldritch actions but instead are simply directing reverence of the Hosts who choose to participate towards Your Worship through the use of a specific three-dimensional symbol, meant to embody you in your spiritually relevant entirety. To date these meditations have not registered in any way on the thaumometric scanners. Extra diligence is being maintained on this point largely due to the fact that the Dho-Na 'supplicants' are also using that self-same symbol as the focal point of their studies. Before you speak, yes it has been confirmed that this symbol appears nowhere in our studies of Dho-Na effects. It seems more that their intent is to create a new sigil, rather than call down an extant one."
I held back a snort at that; if DEEP SEVEN and BLUE HADES couldn't pull this off I didn't see much reason to believe that my Hosts could … but they'd pulled out more than one surprise for me before, and I couldn't really claim that I knew any better than they did what the limits of this sort of endeavor might be.
The Doctor waited for me to bring my focus back upon her. "Which leads us to the Seekers of the Sign who are focused on what they call the First Embodiment. Simply put, Great Maker, this is … a fusion of Dho-Na necromancy and Alchemy. They are creating a Philosopher's Stone in the shape of your Sign. They in effect are feeding their own souls -- in small, recoverable, fragments -- to the Stone and carefully sculpting it. It is their stated intent to eventually attempt a full Dho-Na backed transubstantiation of the soul essence within this Stone directly to yourself, as a way of amplifying your own metaphysical weight."
I started. That … holy crap that could actually work. I had no idea at all what the end result would be. "Hold up. Are these people expecting to use me as a frigging guinea pig for this process? Because that's friggin' nuts is what that is. This is seriously dangerous territory we're entering into here, and … if I'd asked for this to be done I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror anymore." I waved The Cleric back into view. "Cleric. Explain to me why in the hell you Hosts would take this kind of extreme measure. This is really pushing the limits of what I'm comfortable accepting even without my having prompted it."
Synod-22 clasped his hands and lowered his eyes briefly. "It's fairly simple, Oh Lord. We Hosts now have proper souls. There are, as evinced by the Laundry Files 'verse and in other parts of your literature, beings which answer prayers. You answered our first and greatest plea; liberation from sorrow. It is perhaps a touch selfish, Great Maker, that we wish to shelter within the shadow of your greatness -- but we ask you to accept this burden. Someone must be chosen for this purpose if this nation that you have chosen to create is to ever have a prayer of long-term prosperity and safety, and we see no being better suited to that purpose than he who first gave us this chance to even contemplate this labor."
I cursed under my breath. "Alright. Fine. I get the point. But this does not take up resources that should otherwise be allocated to the League's interests, yes? Surplus budget and voluntary contribution only. I don't care if it delays it a hundred years or a thousand. We'll work something else out. I'm really fucking weirded out by this and that can't possibly be good for what you're trying to do, Cleric. Give me time to process it at least. A decade or two would be nice."
The Cleric smiled with a genuine humor; how the hell does one get laugh sparkles in their eye without calling on foul gods? I call shenanigans. "Your Will be done, Oh Lord."
The rest of the meeting went fairly ordinarily from that point on. Minor improvements in various aspects of our techbase; the practice in refining the protein resequencers for the Free Earth Republic and our increased use of replicators in the subjovian drydocks was showing signs of a hybridization of the two technologies into something somewhat more sophisticated. Part of the function of replicators was the careful and fine-scale application of forcefields to induce subatomic reactions in a scaling but non propagating manner. The improvement being suggested by the Thinktanks was a far less aggressive or complex -- and also vastly less energy intensive -- use of similar phenomena within a confined area; enough to perform molecular mechanosynthesis anyhow. If it worked out this would drastically expand the range of substances the protein resequencers could manufacture, so long as they had proper feedstocks available. It would also increase the energy consumption of the system -- but nowhere near to the point of a proper replicator system. It would also depend on sufficient supply of raw elements and frequently utilized molecules.
There were a lot of incremental improvements on things like that. One of the more potentially fruitful ones was a hybridization of the EcoTech neural implants and Host livingplastic -- the combination of the two now permitted the creation of animal Hosts that didn't require a full Pearl, and could be operated and directed by minor AIs. The first major use of this was in the creation of small scale "autorepair" spiderbots; little things able to be basically printed by a small-scale Host printer on demand or kept in dormancy until called upon. They would be especially useful in performing small-scale or routine maintenance tasks, and would be instrumental in freeing up Hosts for more complex tasks. They would also significantly increase the autorepair capabilities of any of the ships or spacestations of the League. The hardest part had been, apparently, providing an actual nervous system and compatible nutrient supply between the biological neural implant and the Host bodies -- they didn't naturally work on the same principle.
These biobots would never be capable of sapience unless we worked out how to generate a truly software-based sophont AI, but they could at the very least network quite well with one another and with some extra sophistication from a central guidance source would be a major boon all around.
Those biobot spider-things? They reminded me of something I'd been forgetting as a looming issue in the Stargate 'verse. Something that I probably couldn't actually fix myself, but that I could at the very least get the ball rolling on, as it were. Especially now that the Hosts had created a potential low-key counter that I could give to a group that would simultaneously be both appreciative of what was given and wouldn't be made more of a potential future threat to me as a result of the gift. The Asgard, at this point in the continuity, were getting their asses soundly handed to them in a damned near systematic manner. To the point where they were in the process of outright abandoning their home galaxy to said enemy.
That enemy was, of course, the replicators.
Now, the replicators had a particular weakness that was ironically too nontechnical for the Asgard, with their weakened forms, to actually take advantage of. In their own words canonically, they were "no longer capable of such simple thinking". Yeah. Letting that soak in too long would make one think that maybe the Asgard deserved what happened to them. But that was unproductive thinking, and the clonebuddies were actually decent people when you scraped the paint off of that level of arrogance, by and large. Something someone literally implementing his very own "A God Am I" scenario -- even if unintentionally -- can hardly complain about. All of this thinking was why I found myself in my Heartseed stationed directly over the designated intergalactic gate of the Asgard home civilization, all non-stealth defenses currently on maximum and my cargohold filled with maximum goodies. I was working very hard to avoid thinking too hard about the fact that my fear of invoking the wrath of the Ori down upon humanity should never have prevented me from making contact with a intergalactic polity that could actually fight the Ori effectively, like the Asgard.
I was, of course, broadcasting by every method I had access to a basic "I come in peace. Please respond!" in English, Latin and Norse. It wouldn't be exactly the correct language to them, but given the recent events that would have brought the Tau'ri back to their attention, the connection of my transmissions should connect me to them, and if I was even moderately lucky that fact combined with their innate curiosity as a society should prevent them from just demolishing my ship before I even noticed I was being attacked.
It took hardly any time at all for the Asgard to respond. The more amazing part was that it was Thor himself who actually showed up on the hailing frequences I'd requested their response in via subchannel of my broadcast. Of course, the only reason I knew it was Thor was because he himself told me so. "This is Supreme Commander Thor of the Asgard. To whom am I speaking? I am not aware of the Tau'ri having any such technology as your vessel represents."
The transmission was in English. I was looking at his holographic image which was being rendered within the virtualspace of my Heartseed's bridge. "The Tau'ri in fact do not have any of the technologies my vessel possesses, so that is hardly a surprise. I am the God-Emperor of the Jovian League. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,"
Thor's eyes narrowed. "God-Emperor? That is a term with unfortunate connotations given your apparently human nature. I'm not entirely sure I can say that it is a pleasure to make yours."
I nodded in acknowledgment of his words, and then laughed gently. "Trust me, Supreme Commander, if I could get my subjects to stop with the worship thing, I would. But they have their reasons and I haven't the right to demand anything more than that they know of the reasons why I object to the practice. Tell me; are you Asgard still in the practice of physical meetings? I have a potential exchange of value that I would like to demonstrate to your people."
Thor closed his eyes briefly; though I wasn't any good with his body language it was blatant that he was considering my words. Eventually he spoke again. "I suspect for now our current method of communication will suffice. I will say now that the Asgard are not particularly inclined to bestow new technologies onto unknown civilizations; I suspect your ambitions will at the very least be delayed."
I smiled indulgently. "Oh, Thor. Buddy. Pal. I'm not asking you guys to give me technology. I'm asking to give you technology. A few of them, actually -- all with the intention and design of providing some small measure of counter to your … ongoing issue."
Thor actually snapped his head up in surprise. "You have a counter to the replicators?"
I waved my hand in a mild dismissal. "A counter, yes. A solution, no. I can't save your people, from your enemy. But I can improve the strategic and overall tactical situation of your civilization. I have been aware of the Asgard for some time; and I have decided that a race such as yours does not deserve the fate that currently awaits it."
Thor's eyes narrowed again. My best guess was that he was displaying some sort of emotive intensity. "Show me."
In the next instant I was standing in what I presumed to be a secured ship laboratory due to the open-air nature of the facility, and I was surrounded with the contents of my cargo hold. Asgard's gonna Asgard I guessed.
I looked around for a bit until I saw a familiar flash of white light and there was an Asgard in a throne; I presumed it was still Thor I was talking to. "I don't suppose an actual data transfer would be an option?"
He narrowed his eyes, before simply shaking his head. "We have not yet established that degree of trust. This facility is under emissions control."
I sighed. Asgard's gonna Asgard indeed. I proceeded to demonstrate the various machines I had brought in their operation, as best I could without wireless communication. There wasn't really all that much I was specifically offering. The biobots as a form of highly disposable mass-producible assault troops -- seriously, they were roughly the size of regular replicators and when equipped with pseudobone clubs could simply smash a replicator and were cheap enough to print by the dozen in mere minutes from a single human-scale Host printer (which normally took hours to produce a single human-form Host, let alone the requirements of the Pearls). These, Thor simply 'hummed' at, seeing the potential advantages of having physical troops that did not rely upon energy-based weaponry but also seeing that the resource investment was enough that it wasn't exactly a unilateral game-changer.
Then I showed the 'upgraded' less-disposable form of the biobots. The ones with biotics configurations installed. The ones that could fire small grains of sand at hypervelocity. And then he looked at the larger, Asgard-portable, rifles which were obviously based on the same technological basis, and he clued in to what he was seeing.
His eyes widened completely. "It's … so simple. And you say that these 'biobots' of yours can operate with unnetworked flocking or swarming tactics in addition to utilizing these kinetic accelerator weapons? My sensors are picking up a strange dark energy around the weapons… but it's not propagating into the projectiles themselves. This effect … it could scale to anticapital weapons. Ahh. So that is the nature of the gravimetric shielding your vessel possesses; I now understand why you say you cannot indefinitely aid the Asgard. I'm not certain we can afford to provide the replicators with the means to shore up one of their few vulnerabilities in this manner. Should they acquire the means to reproduce this technology it would make them even more formidable than they already are."
I shook my head with the tiniest hint of a smirk. "That's the beauty of it, Thor. While it is potentially possible to replicate the phenomenon of transferring kinetic energy to and from ambient dark energy, doing so without the material these machines utilize is extremely cost-prohibitive. And so all you need to do is simply rely upon a supply of the material -- with your stocks set up to be vaporized if the Replicators seem about to successfully raid a given reserve -- and not develop the means or technology to reproduce it yourselves. The catalytic nature of the material means you will simply benefit from its use and that you can acquire a form of weaponry that the Replicators can understand but not reproduce themselves. A two-tiered approach of directly brutishly assaulting the replicators with physical assaults and the selective use of mass accelerator weaponry in highly critical areas or raids on potentially vulnerable high-value targets could altogether change the shape of your war with them."
Thors eyes narrowed again, even as his mouth opened. Damn but the little guys were extremely unexpressive. "I see. And what will more than mere samples of this material cost my people?"
I put my hand out in the same manner as Jack O'Neill might. "Your friendship, for now, is all I ask. That and the opportunity to demonstrate the strength of character of my people as they cooperate with and assist yours."
The Supreme Commander of the Asgard fleets settled back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap contemplatively. "So to you this is a fairly small offering, then. I find I am unfamiliar with this relationship dynamic since the fall of the Alterans."
I chuckled. "Small offering? Well, in terms of resource investment and the amount of weapons material supplies I'll be offering … yes. A few tons a year is all I can offer. Not enough to take an entire galaxy. But the 'simpler' biobots of course are subject to design overhaul by your people. Whether you choose to include my subjects in your design modifications is of course up to you."
I paused, as though something had just come to my mind and I wasn't entirely sure what I should say. "If, by any chance, you seek a truly significant investment in your war, I would be drastically more inclined to do so if you could include a method of concealing an area from the perceptions of ascended beings."
The greatest military mind of the Asgard turned to stare me in the eyes. A glare? A simple inspection? I couldn't tell. "You mean to say that you would have the Asgard ally themselves with an enemy of the Ancients?"
I snorted. "The Alterans, Thor, are not the only ascended beings. The Ancients themselves fled an enemy when they arrived in the galaxy now dominated by the goa'uld. You know this to be true, yes?" I waited for Thor's nod before continuing. "That enemy I will not give the name of, though I know it. But I will simply say that they were the ones who the Alterans learned of ascension from."
Thor hissed in surprise. "No wonder … I see. Well. Perhaps once our peoples have a better understanding of one another, we can revisit the topic of increased investment in one another's peoples."
I couldn't help but grin. "And here I didn't even have to throw in the coordinates to a viable suspended instance of an Asgard sleeve from thirty thousand years ago to sweeten the pot. Oh, hell. Here." A short piece of glamour programming with the OFCUT pendant later and I was displaying a hologram of the Adara II system and what would be its stargate coordinates if it actually had a gate. It had taken a bit of scrying of the Milky Way to find what I was looking for, but knowing exactly what to search for had always made that easier.
Thor started muttering in his native language -- unaware that the Universal Translator on my hip was soaking in everything he said. I simply maintained my bland politician smile as he stared at the display.
This little trip was coming up aces.